Drive past a fuel station twice in the same day and the number on the sign may not match. Nobody finds that suspicious, it's just how filling stations work, and has been for decades. Now check the price posted at a public EV charger. There's a good chance it's the exact same number it was last week, and the week before that.
That's backwards from what the underlying commodities actually do. Wholesale electricity is one of the most volatile prices in any market, it can swing from scarce to worthless and back inside a single day, and go negative outright. Wholesale fuel, by comparison, is priced once a day against a benchmark that barely moves hour to hour.
The commodity that moves the least has a retail price that visibly jumps around. The commodity that moves the most has a retail price that barely does.
How often each one actually updates
On the fuel side, retail price boards typically move once a day, with high-competition corridors seeing two to four changes as nearby stations react to each other. That sits on top of a wholesale layer, Argus and S&P Global Platts, the two benchmark price-reporting agencies used across the fuel supply chain, publish a fresh assessed price for each product once a day, compiled from spot trades through the session. Roughly one update a day at the wholesale level, roughly the same at the pump.
On the electricity side, the day-ahead auction that sets the reference price for most of continental Europe moved from hourly to 15-minute pricing on 1 October 2025. That's 96 separate prices a day instead of 24, recalculated daily to reflect what generation and demand actually look like, block by block. And the retail price a driver sees at most public chargers is one number, set whenever the operator last touched their pricing page, which for a lot of networks is measured in weeks or months, not quarter-hours.
Update frequency, bar length on a log scale. Wholesale fuel benchmarks and pump price boards move at similar, roughly daily frequency. Wholesale electricity now reprices 96 times a day. Most public EV charging tariffs sit on one flat number for weeks. Sources: Argus Media, S&P Global Platts, EPEX SPOT.
The part that isn't really about technology
It's tempting to read that gap as fuel retailers simply being further along, and electricity retail catching up. Some of that's true. But a chunk of it comes from something structural that has nothing to do with which industry adopted software first: how long the transaction actually takes.
Filling a tank takes a few minutes. Whatever the pump price is when the nozzle goes in is, for all practical purposes, the price for the whole transaction, because the transaction is over before the number on the sign could plausibly change again. A public DC fast-charging session averages around 42 minutes. If the price could move mid-session the way a fuel price can move between two fill-ups on the same day, a driver would have no idea what they actually agreed to pay. The EU's AFIR ad-hoc pricing rules reflect exactly that: operators have to show the price before the session starts, and that's the price the session is expected to honour. A commodity whose retail transaction takes forty minutes can't reprice as casually as one that takes four, not because the software is harder to build, but because the promise being made to the customer is a different shape.
The regulatory lineage is different too
Electricity retail didn't grow up as a purely competitive market the way fuel retail did. It grew up next to a regulated utility monopoly, with consumer-protection rules, notice periods for tariff changes, and energy-poverty safeguards built in over decades, because electricity was treated as essential infrastructure in a way that filling a car never quite was in the same regulatory sense. Some of that legacy still shapes how comfortable retail electricity pricing is with moving fast, independent of whether the technology to do so now exists.
Fuel retail also had a forcing function electricity never had: the sign itself. A roadside price board is a competitive weapon, visible from the road, checked by drivers deciding which station to pull into. That visibility created decades of pressure toward frequent, responsive pricing. Electricity, priced on a bill that shows up once a month, never had an equivalent moment of being checked and compared in real time, until EV charging apps started showing a live per-kWh number the way a fuel sign does.
What's actually converging
The gap is closing, just later than it did in fuel. In the Netherlands, the number of households on a dynamic electricity contract passed half a million in the summer of 2025, according to the ACM's own consumer market monitoring, up from a market that barely existed three years earlier. The wholesale infrastructure for genuinely fine-grained pricing, 15-minute day-ahead blocks, intraday markets that trade continuously, now exists at a resolution fuel markets have never needed. What's still catching up is the retail layer built specifically for public charging, where most operators are still running one flat number instead of a price that reflects what a 15-minute electricity market is actually doing.
The practical takeaway
Fuel's dynamic pricing isn't evidence that electricity dynamic pricing is unnecessary complexity dressed up as innovation. It's evidence of what retail pricing looks like once it's had decades to catch up to how a volatile commodity actually behaves, with the constant visible checking that forces it to stay current. Electricity retail, and public EV charging specifically, is earlier on that same curve, held back less by missing software than by a transaction that lasts forty minutes instead of four, and a regulatory history built for a monopoly utility rather than a competitive fuel forecourt. The commodity is already dynamic. The retail price catching up to it, safely, within the length of a real charging session, is the part still being built.
That's the constraint we designed around at ProxiLink: a price that moves with real demand and real wholesale volatility, set and shown before a session starts, honoured for its duration the way AFIR expects, rather than a flat number that quietly ignores what the underlying electricity is actually doing.
Frequently asked questions
Why does wholesale electricity reprice 96 times a day while wholesale fuel updates about once?
Because since 1 October 2025, the day-ahead auction that sets the reference electricity price for most of continental Europe (EPEX SPOT's Single Day-Ahead Coupling) moved from hourly to 15-minute pricing, producing 96 separate prices a day instead of 24. Wholesale fuel, by contrast, is priced against a benchmark, Argus or S&P Global Platts, that both publish one assessed price per product per day, compiled from spot trades through the session. The commodities aren't equally volatile either: electricity can swing from scarce to worthless and back inside a single day and even go negative, while the daily fuel benchmark barely moves hour to hour.
If wholesale electricity is that volatile, why doesn't the price at a public charger move just as often?
Partly transaction length. A public DC fast-charging session averages around 42 minutes, and EU AFIR rules require the price to be shown before the session starts and honoured for its duration, so a tariff can't be repriced mid-session the way a fuel price effectively can between two separate fill-ups. Partly regulatory history: electricity retail grew up next to a regulated utility monopoly with consumer-protection and notice-period rules, while fuel retail developed as a purely competitive market with a roadside price sign that created decades of pressure toward frequent repricing.
Why did fuel end up with frequent retail repricing when its wholesale benchmark only updates once a day?
The visible price board itself. A roadside sign is a competitive weapon, checked by drivers deciding which station to pull into, so stations in competitive corridors adjust it once to several times a day just to track each other, independent of how often the underlying wholesale benchmark moves. Electricity never had an equivalent daily, visible comparison moment until EV charging apps started showing a live per-kWh number the way a fuel sign does.
Is the gap between fuel and electricity retail pricing closing?
Yes, on the electricity side. In the Netherlands, the number of households on a dynamic electricity contract passed half a million in the summer of 2025, according to the ACM's own consumer market monitoring, up from a market that barely existed three years earlier. The wholesale infrastructure for fine-grained pricing, 15-minute day-ahead blocks and continuous intraday trading, already exists. What's still catching up is the retail layer built specifically for public EV charging, where most operators still run one flat number instead of a price that reflects what the electricity market is actually doing.